Isaac Fulton Bell, around 1915--HP's granduncle

Born 1896

Oklahoma, fracking away, fracking away, denying climate change

"Top Bernie Sanders Aide Rankles Those In and Out of Campaign"--DUH!

On news shows he comes off as so mean and bitter and hateful and smarmy that I almost can't believe he is working for a Democrat. Has anyone checked to see if he is really secretly working for Ted Cruz? Certainly he is doing Bernie Sanders more harm than good.

Name him: Jeff Weaver.

Baking day in Morro Bay

Too cheap to preheat 2 ovens. This is the first batch by itself.

Morro Bay Tourists Love Their Dogs

Battered, Bruised, I went back to Windows 7--No more dealing with Carmen or Contura in Windows 10

Oh, the joy of seeing Search so I can look through all my files for Phineas Boheemush. Oh, the joy of seeing "All Programs" and going there and finding the program I want. Now if Windows Live will just settle down . . . .

WINDOWS LIVE Hell--45 mins. on phone, then sent into black hole / blacker hole

The message could not be sent. The setting for your outgoing email [SMTP] server might need to be configured. To find the server settings for '<Unknown>', please contact your email service provider.


Server Error: 501
Server Response: 501 Syntax error in arguments
Server: 'outbound.att.net'
Windows Live Mail Error ID: 0x800CCC79
Protocol: SMTP
Port: 465
Secure(SSL): Yes

Cheering words from Jerry W. Ward "The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery Paperback" 2009

Cheering words from Jeremy Lopez

Christmas Dinner on the Beach

Don't trust John D. MacDonald to update his own stories, please

You really can't trust any writer to try to regain control of an old work. The creative process is a process, as I argued long ago, that begins, continues, and if the stars are aligned right, ends, ENDS! People did not want to hear this in 1984 as shown by the trashing of my FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS. My goodness, my goodness, look at that title by date in Amazon.com and you see that every year people speak respectfully of it, after the initial several years of contemptuous comments. The worst was Gary Davenport saying that if I was right all of Western Civilization would crumble away because it is built on the sanctity of the Word.

So I have in hand another 1984 book which may have been welcomed back then. John D. MacDonald in MORE GOOD OLD STUFF has this to say about his earlier foreword to THE GOOD OLD STUFF: I "had taken the liberty of updating such mechanical matters as taxi fares, pay scales, phone procedures and the price of a drink in those stories which did not depend upon the particular year in which they were placed to achieve their effect. Also, I took the liberty of changing those words in common usage which over the years have acquired a flavor I did not intend. 'Gay' is an example of one of these unfortunate changes. . . . I want my stories to entertain. If a story captures and entertains a reader, one certain way of breaking the spell is to make him conscious of he fact that he is reading a story. If the hero rushes into a candy store and puts a nickel in a pay phone, it jars. If he buys a quart of milk for twenty cents, the spell is broken."

Back to the library with MORE GOOD OLD STUFF unread. Only a wistful writer would think that a reader is not conscious that he or she is reading a story. Only a wistful writer would think that every story is not of its own time, ineluctably.

Can you guess how long I have waited to use the word ineluctably correctly?

Busy buzzards leave these remains of the sea creature

Only non-avian critter on the beach in the rain today besides me. Big.

Blindsided by MidSomer Murders--

This is the time of year for counting the newly dead and remembering those longer dead. I pass daily by reminders of Maurice Sendak and Cousin Ben Tindall (how he would have loved sharing my new cache of documents from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History!). Last night watching an episode of MidSomer Murders I was blindsided when Tom Barnaby went into the archives of a library. I cried out in pain, and my companion understood why, for she knew the particular photographs I was reminded of. Jay Leyda 1986. And Brian Higgins 1986---Brian who did not call me on my birthday this year and did not send a Christmas card.

Basement, Troy Public Library. Want to know what Jay said? He said, "I would rather be working here than in the Pierpont Morgan Library." What he's doing is reading a new review of MOBY-DICK found by Parker using a version of the Leyda Wand.

Got the basic search in Windows 10, maybe

OK, all you do is click on the 4 little squares at the lower left.
Then before you do anything else you type in what you want to look up, say "Humphrey Cockerham"--
Then you click on My Stuff.

Jeremy Carter--a very distant Pottenger cousin of mine

But in the South, cousins count. Rosalynn Carter is the Pottenger, not the former President.

It's Probably Unmanly to let Windows 10 Drive you to Tears

But, oh, to be able to search all your documents for the places where the words "Abel Sparks" occur. My great advisor told me how and now I am ashamed to ask him again.
Oh to be able to look at your Programs so you can choose Computer and see how much space is left on your flashdrive.
Oh to click one button and find how long you are going to live under Windows 10 and Carly Fiorina.

Beaches at Morro Bay Mobbed Again for Xmas

What can you do when there is no room for a beach blanket?

Scottish Literary Review on Jane Millgate

The 1978 book, Editing Nineteenth-Century Fiction, shows how important

Millgate has been to developing and intertwining scholarly communities, too. In her

introduction to papers given at the Conference on Editorial Problems, Millgate deftly

addresses the variations of method that might be expected in this formative moment for

major editions. Hershel Parker, as recently as 2013, refracted the energy, enthusiasm

and commitment of that conference as a community. He touted in particular “Millgate’s

Great Essay on Scott’s THE SIEGE OF MALTA,” “still the best study of “a document over

which its author did not have full mental or physical control.’” Millgate’s, he reminds

us, is pioneering work—not just in editing, or in the formative discipline of disability

studies, but in linking scholars and expanding fields.

 

From Caroline McCracken-Flesher's part of the tribute.

Jane Millgate's Great Essay on The Siege of Malta, after this post was quoted in Scottish Literary Review

Carolina McCracken-Flesher this morning says this gave Jane pleasure. What more could I ask?

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Jane Millgate's Great Essay on Scott's THE SIEGE OF MALTA

I am looking at my cherished offprint of Jane Millgate's article in the BULLETIN OF RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES (Summer 1979), the glory days of David Erdman's editorship. I think this is still the best study of "a document over which its author did not have full mental or physical control and which does not make complete sense phrase by phrase." Millgate's work complements the work being done at the same time by Albert Rothenberg in THE EMERGING GODDESS (1979) on the way authors in normal health, not authors who have suffered a debilitating stroke as Scott had, tend to lose control of their works soon after finishing them because the creative process is finished and they are already absorbed in their next production. Millgate's pioneering work demonstrates how an author's physical debility can cause gross textual anomalies and impossibilities even while the author's characteristic broad vision of his plot is still evident. If her contemporaries had admitted the existence then only whispered about as "the creative process" they might have made her work the foundation of many extraordinary studies . It's an astounding essay: "The Limits of Editing: The Problem of Scott's THE SIEGE OF MALTA."

Dunes carved by the recent storm at Morro Bay

With Scott Norsworthy

Weird things as I try to get to Picasa from Windows 10. This one made me smile with memories of a great visit from Scott Norsworthy, here on the North 40 which Roger Lyons and Bruce Gibson saved for the state of California.

"I'm Angry," says Carly. Who will pay for her anger this time? Who is the next Robert Dear?

When Carly gets angry on TV, her "Warriors" like Robert Dear become inflamed. What nut job will respond to her anger last night?

Somehow Got Windows 10 to accept Picasa--Dunes Sculpted to Butte by Storm

When in despair, kick yourself in the head and then Windows 10 sort of works.

Windows 10--Only for the Moment?

It looks to me as if Windows 10 does not recognize the possibility that a user might have hundreds of files on a particular topic dating back several years. Windows 10 seems to live in the moment, maybe where the person with the longest memory is a webzine contributor who creates an article from what's on Google.
Why have a Control Panel?
Why have an easy search of every document on your Computer?
Why go to Computer on the Control Panel and see how much space is left in a flash drive?
Why have a memory?

4 Hours getting Windows 10 only to find that it stole my Control Panel

This is progress?

Finishing the last "Historical Note" in the Final Volume of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Bob Sandberg, who has been heroically transcribing Melville's poetical manuscripts, has been heroically criticizing my "Historical Note," now only a few back and forth emails from being OK to go. Well, the edition started in 1965 and with any luck will be completed in 2016, only a few years after we started. Sandberg is one of Hayford's younger students. Now he is retired and thinking of buying a house up north in a town where one of my Bell cousins, a 50er if not a 49er, built the first Court House.
I look over at a wooden waste box I picked up at the Northwestern warehouse in 1965. Got a nice square wooden one that has another 50 years of active life to go, unlike some of us.

Intrepid Traveler Pausing on Way to Paso Robles

Paso has suffered from the drought. Where did the high-spirited Gallic charm go?

Nobody else on 2 mile stretch of California Beach, again Today

Yesterday in the rain there was no one else in sight up and down the beach from North Point to Morro Rock. Today, after real rain, crossing Duck Creek (dry these 4 years) and Cloisters Creek (also dry these 4 years) took climbing into dunes and a little selective jumping. It was wildly beautiful, and not a single other person was in sight.

This water you see is in the dunes where water has no reason to be. There is no beach.

"Carly Fiorina struggling to break through with women"--But she sure broke through with Robert Dear

Carly Fiorina struggling to break through with women

After two standout debate performances that lifted the candidate to the top 3 in some national polls, Fiorina is now far behind the top tier of GOP candidates

Posted: 12:06 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015

After two standout debate performances that lifted the candidate to the top 3 in some national polls, Fiorina is now far behind the top tier of GOP candidates---

 

BUT SHE PROVED HERSELF A GREAT COMMUNICATOR BY HER INFLUENCE ON HER WARRIOR, ROBERT DEAR.

Posted: 12:06 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015
 
 

80 and a week

At the Vet's Hall in Morro Bay.

Russell Weaver's stories about me are another matter

The anecdote I just posted about a student drunk-dialing me is amusing. I am rather more baffled by Russell Weaver in his new book on BILLY BUDD. I have marked a dozen passages where the language is twisted so as not to be obviously grudging. This is from memory, but it will let you know the genre: "This is not to obviate what Parker says." I see that my first name is misspelled in Works Cited and that Yannella's last name is misspelled. I cringe. The elderly and the dead deserve more respect. I can't read Weaver until we are done with the final Northwestern-Newberry volume, but it is proving curious to turn through. I see that Weaver knows me better than I know myself, for he frequently says what I must think and what I would have thought. Well, no, no, not really.
Back to the Historical Note to the final volume.

Stories that Circulate About You If You Live Long Enough

A FRIEND JUST SENT ME THIS.

Workshop Heretic

Jacob Weber 

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Don't get an M.F.A. (final post)

My first course in graduate school was a survey on Melville. Melville is my favorite writer. The professor for the class was Brian Higgins, one of the great Melville scholars in the world. (I'm sorry to find out that Brian died in May.) This was as close to Heaven as I would ever find in life. He told a story about fellow Melville scholar Hershel Parker. A former student of Parker's drunk-dialed him in the middle of the night once, his plaintive voice pleading for an answer to the question, "My God, Hershel, what does Moby-Dick mean?" Parker was reportedly proud of the answer he managed to scrape together while still half-asleep: "When you go up against the universe, you're likely to get the shit kicked out of you."

I hope you liked that anecdote. It cost me about $50,000.

Gulls and Mallards This Morning

On this day in 1941

my first strawberry ice cream cone which I thought I would not like but did like. The grownups had to have been very excited to be so extravagant.

What punishment is adequate for headline writer who says "Mom in California Rampage"?

Tashfeen Malik, Mom in California Rampage, Became Very Devout: Report

by F. Brinley Bruton 

"Mom" is the last word that should have been used. Fanatic? Maniac? Terrorist?    

Hershel Parker at 80, Robert Sandberg at Younger than That

5 Dec. 2015, pictures of each other on Bob's good camera.

The Tall Ship LADY WASHINGTON in Morro Bay 5 December 2015

Carly is Pro-Life except where Living People are concerned.

I am reading the news with horror.
Who was the victim in Colorado? Only Carly.
Who was the victim in California yesterday? Only Carly.

News from San Berdo is horrible. Look at Kevin Hayes and Bob Madison dining in Landenberg.

Dixie Chicks add a second State Fair show

Good news. But no one is ever "made whole again" after horrendous mistreatment. Well, maybe they will be glorious on stage again.